


the stars were made for fallin'

by Sharkchimedes



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 20:12:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17608139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharkchimedes/pseuds/Sharkchimedes
Summary: Stakar has been looking for his wings for twenty years.Literally. He doesn't know where they went. Supposedly, until he was four, he'd had golden ink all across his back, and then, around the time he was moved to another group home, they'd disappeared.Since then, he's had a hawk loosely swooping around an ankle. He feels like he can remember it belonging around someone else's leg, maybe, but he'd been four.His brother and the kid he took in both have found theirs, and he's happy that they've found whatever they're looking for, whether that's romantic or something else.He just wishes he knew where his wings went.





	the stars were made for fallin'

**Author's Note:**

> this is pure self indulgence ffhfhhf. 
> 
> title & chapter title is from "dream sweet in sea major"!

Stakar is adopted out when he’s six. It’s to the Ogord family, which is nice, because he finally gets a surname.

He’s been in and out of group homes since he was a baby, basically, and when he arrives at their small house in the outskirts of downtown, all he has to his name  _ is _ his name and a golden hawk inlain on his right ankle. The bag of early reading books and child’s scribblings is something that gets exchanged out with moves and thievery and trades with other kids, so it’s not until after he’s been settled in with the Ogords that he has much else he considers his.

It's not a bad place, although that doesn't mean a whole lot to a six year old. He thinks it's great, because he has his own room and parents, even if he takes a while to warm up to them. And after a few months, the looming fear of being left again fades away.

\---

About three years later, Martinex comes along, a tiny little toddler who comes complete with a surname of T’Naga, and a slowly-clarifying diamond on his baby-fattened arm. He’s an excitable kid, and a bit loud, but that’s okay. Stakar had never actually  _ minded _ the younger kids. He carefully follows after his little brother to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself. Marty will get into  _ anything _ if he can, but he also likes to be read to, which Stakar doesn’t mind as he works his way through every reachable book that he can understand. 

When his brother is four, the diamond is clear and crisp as if it was a tattoo. It’s a popular pastime of any family or friend group to study their soulmarks and try to divine what the kid would be like when they grew up, or if it was just a design born from pure aesthetic on the part of whatever being or factor determined what you got. With Marty, it’s probably both, given how the kid is like a magpie for glitter and already showing signs of extroversion and drawing people to him. And he's  _ four _ . Who knows what kind of chaos he'll use his power for when he's old enough to know he can.

Stakar had stared at the hawk around his ankle for a week after, trying to decide if it had always been there. He doesn’t even consider what it  _ means _ , just that it still feels a strange amount of  _ different _ than he thinks it should. Like once, even before his mark had clarified, there was nothing there. It’s a weird feeling.

A look through the paperwork that accompanied him when he arrived and he’d been no closer to a truth. The files claim the hawk was there, but the record was only as old as the Ogord’s interest in him. 

He  _ knows _ it’s not his. Well- it  _ is _ his, because it’s on his ankle, but when he changes and gets glimpses at his back, it feels like something used to be there, too.

He has no proof, though, so he lets it go and focuses on his reading and teaching Marty.

He forgets for a while.

\---

Sometime after Martinex’s sixth birthday, they lose Mrs. Ogord. It’s in the summer, so Stakar is home for the entirety of the shocking departure, holding Marty tight as he can and hiding in the corner of their room while the sirens blare and their father shouts.

For a month, Stakar tries to keep himself and Marty as un-underfoot as possible. He doesn’t remember really what it was like before he’d been here, but he doesn’t want to go back, and he doesn’t want to lose Marty either. He’s read a lot by now, and other kids who figure out he’s adopted have told him that sometimes parents will send kids back when something like this happens. 

He has no idea if they’re right or just being cruel, but he doesn’t want to take chances.

Stakar has his name, and his hawk, and Marty, and a backpack of books and the papers that name him adopted. He wants to keep his father too.

It’s hard, and he doesn’t remember a lot of it in the following years. Stakar is only ten, after all. It’s a lot-  _ too much _ \- for a child in the first place, let alone one trying to pick up the slack of two parents. Marty doesn’t understand completely, but he keeps trying to cheer his brother up. 

When it finally hits the six-year-old that their mother is gone, there’s a bawling fit for the records, Marty clinging to Stakar and begging him not to go to, and Stakar starts crying too and promising that he won’t ever,  _ ever _ leave.

That’s how their dad finds them, and he wraps them both up and carries them to bed. Things change after that. He’s never the same man, but he’s still their father.

\---

When he’s in the third grade, for some reason, he has his socks rolled down and another kid sees the hawk. 

They’d already been calling him “the one who knows” behind his back, because of all the time he spends in the library, but now they start calling him “starhawk”. Stakar figures it’s meant to be literal and mostly ignores it. A lot of kids end up with nicknames that riff off their marks, whether that’s a good or bad thing. It brings back to mind the nearly forgotten feelings about whether or not it was his birthmark or not.

Even if he still thinks he used to have something else, it means he’s not alone. Somewhere out there, there’s someone. Someone besides his dad and Marty that might like him.    


Maybe they wouldn’t mind him reading so much either, he thinks as he listens to some of the kids yelling down the hall. 

That’s the same year he meets Krugarr in the stacks, and they bond over weird old comics that Krugarr pulls from behind shelves along with books that they probably shouldn’t be able to read. He’s the first person Stakar isn’t related to that he lets see his ankle on purpose, and Krugarr shows him his own mark, which is an intricately patterned circle on an elbow. Stakar shows him the hawk that gave him the nickname and they joke around making nicknames out of Krugarr’s marking, before settling on “the sorcerer supreme”. 

After that, Stakar meets Mainframe (and they never do call her by her first name, even decades later.) Marty ends up worming his way into the group too- which isn’t really a surprise, because where Stakar goes, he’s either already there or is following after- which no one minds. They make an odd bunch, but they have fun. 

\---

When he’s in the fifth grade, he’s aware enough to realize what losing your original mark means. Either whoever it belongs to is dead, and you never met them, which makes it scar over; or you’ve met your match and they’ve switched places.

He is more convinced than ever now, that his mark has already done that. He asks his father about it, and the older man runs his hand along the scars on his forearm and says that if Stakar is so sure, then maybe it had really happened. 

There’s not really anything else either of them can do to prove it, but having the acknowledgement makes him feel better. 

\---

The next year, they move cities, and in the unpacking Stakar finds more of the papers he’d come to the Ogord’s with. On one of them, is a crude child’s portrait, and sprouting in jaggedly, unsteady lines from the figure’s back are golden wings. He sits on the ladder step to their new attic and stares, tracing a finger down the waxy lines of crayon, and reaching back to reach up under his shirt and along his spine.

He  _ knew _ that the hawk wasn’t his birthmark. A sealed envelope is next out of the box, and he tears the seal to find pictures of himself when he was a toddler. He can see fuzzy, distorted golden ink under the sleeveless swim shirt in one. 

He’d had  _ wings. _

That’s where Marty finds him, sent by their father to see what was keeping him. Stakar is still combing the pictures for  _ any _ glimpse of another child’s ankle, as most of the pictures were before he’d been abandoned. But none show. 

If only four year old him had been as decent at drawing as he had at reading.

He bunches the folio and the drawing up and marches downstairs, but stops at the door when he sees their father sitting at the kitchen counter. If Ogord hadn’t told him about these before, either he hadn’t known they existed or…

Well, there is no “or”. Ogord’s never done anything out of spite or cruelty to himself or Marty, besides maybe leave them alone more often than he thinks most parents do, but that’s because of their mom dying. And that has nothing to do with the hawk around his ankle. 

It’s more likely that the packet had been mistaken for something else and just packed away. Stakar, though, doesn’t put them back; he puts them in the bottom drawer of his and Marty’s desk. It’s where he hides the stuff Marty’s not allowed to get into, like his grade cards and his auto mags.

Watching another sickeningly sweet rom-com with Marty that night, he wonders what the chances of figuring out the rest of the puzzle are.

(They keep in touch after the move. Even if they drift, they all stay good friends, and they meet up when they can. When Marty meets Charlie later that year, he gets dragged into the group too. The two of them stick together like glue, and Stakar is grateful to have another person to watch Marty’s antics.)

\---

Stakar gets an apprenticeship at the local bike shop when he’s sixteen. Their father is shocked that he isn’t planning to apply for college, but Stakar tries to explain that while he likes learning- still hoards books from sales and from their elderly neighbors who think it’s sweet that a boy like him, who looks a little rough and is learning to talk sauve, still reads religiously- he wants to do something with his hands more. 

Going to school with money neither he or their father really have when he can just keep his library card and get materials off Krugarr, who did get an application into the state school (liking to be multiple steps ahead of everyone else), seems like an unnecessary hassle. Plus, if he did go to school, he’d be leaving Marty behind. 

He isn’t expecting Marty to get invested in it too, and the twelve-year-old starts spending almost all of his free time watching Stakar watch the head mechanic. Vance doesn’t seem to mind that there’s now a teenager and a barely-not-a-teenager kid around, so long as Marty doesn’t knock anything over. 

Vance Astrovik is probably about two decades ahead of Stakar, with a thick Russian accent and a vast reserve of mechanical knowledge that is not restricted just to bikes. He takes over as a father figure for them both, and Stakar is never sure whether the tattoo on his is arm is a tattoo or a mark. But it's not really his business, so he doesn't ask.

\---

At eighteen, Stakar moves out. Between his salary and Vance’s connections that get him a decent place near the shop for decent money, it feels like time. Marty punches him when he tells them, but by the time his brother is driving, he’s also taken up about half the space. Their father doesn’t seem to mind, if he is a bit sad. 

When Marty can officially and legally leave with his diploma in hand and a full time position to match Stakar’s at the bike shop, their father tells them he’s going to move back to where they’d grown up.

They drift, after that.

\---

When Stakar is twenty-three, the old owner retires and hands the reins over to Stakar. It’s a bit of a shock, but he’s determined to make it work, and with Marty planning on sticking around, they can handle it. Plus, the senior mechanic is gonna stay until they’ve got it all under control.

Vance makes a whole big deal out of it, taking Stakar out for drinks (Marty pouts and whines but Stakar sends him back to the apartment, because they may not be the most picturesque family, he’s not letting his still underage brother try to bum booze off him. Even if that difference between his age and the legal age, as Marty keeps pointing out, is just a year and some change because of their birthdays.)

At the end of the night, Vance hands Stakar the keys and tells him to stay smart and watch out for Marty. 

Of course Stakar is gonna look after Marty. He’ll look after his little brother for as long as Marty sticks around.

\---

Marks are funny. They don’t necessarily mean that the person you’re looking for is your romantic partner. That would be a pretty cruel way to run a universe. They can end up platonic too, and it doesn’t mean you can’t find love or friendship elsewhere. 

Stakar just wants  _ something _ . Just a little taste. Just enough to know that the picture and drawing he has aren’t some kind of cruel joke on the part of the universe. Sure, you can pass your soulmate in a crowd or sit next to them on a train and not notice it, but that’s also the kind of thing you’re aware of enough to have the choice to take to a forum or site to post the details of when it may have happened and wait it out.

He doesn’t have that option. All he has is a not legally-recognized certainty that he’s had his soulmark since he was too young to remember.

But he’s waited two decades now. And nothing has changed.

So Stakar pushes it to the back of his mind, and he moves on.

**Author's Note:**

> i would have tagged slow burn but aleta doesn't show up until chapter three i believe and once that happens its not at all slow. i did go ahead and tag her though!
> 
> i'm estimating this will be about 5-6 chapters and a possible epilogue! thanks for joining me on this episode of "shark's wild ride". 
> 
> /i also apologize for any age discrepancies that didnt get get fixed w stakar & martinex in this chapter, for some reason half were four and half were six and i tried to get them to four but i may have missed one ^^;


End file.
